The goal of the project openCRX

The history of openCRX

After careful analysis of the market for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software we came to the conclusion that the world needs a professional enterprise-class Open Source CRM solution for several reasons:

Spending millions on a commercial CRM solution to get an "intelligent data warehouse" with a few business rules simply does not seem justified - with a professional Open Source CRM solution you can spend your money on company-specific features and integrating CRM with the rest of your business (systems and processes) instead of financing the marketing machinery of the typical CRM vendor. It is just a fact that the true value of any CRM solution can only be unlocked with proper customization and integration, regardless of what you read in glossy brochures.

The cost-advantages of rented/hosted CRM applications over commercial solutions may materialize - or not (and yes, the marketing machines of many CRM providers are really outstanding...); far more important, however, is the fact that neither rented/hosted CRM solutions nor commercial CRM solutions can beat the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a well-designed Open Source CRM solution like openCRX.

While it is very smart to let somebody else do the work for you (e.g. running your CRM application) it is definitely not so smart to trust your most valuable data (information about your customers) to just anybody. In particular, handing over all your valuable customer data to a company under foreign jurisdiction is a substanial business risk. So, when you looked at those hosted/rented CRM applications, did you ever ask yourself where exactly they would store your data and how much better you would feel about staying in control?

Hence, back in 2003 we started modeling the core of a reference CRM-application. The tool of choice for developing an open source CRM solution was openMDX, the leading open source MDA platform (MDA = Model Driven Architecture). In February 2004 we already released an initial version of the core models. The first public version of openCRX was released on 1-August-2004 and we admit that we have been totally overwhelmed by the interest in openCRX ever since.

Some of the openCRX milestones:

Date

Milestone

01-Aug-2004

initial launch of openCRX v1.0.0

09-Aug-2004

made the Top100 on Sourceforge for the first time ("most active" ranking)

04-Sep-2004

openCRX v1.1.1 (support for additional DBs and language localization)

06-Sep-2004

reached 1,000 downloads

20-Sep-2004

reached 3,000 downloads

25-Sep-2004

made the Top20 on Sourceforge for the first time ("most active" ranking)

29-Sep-2004

made the Top10 on Sourceforge for the first time ("most active" ranking)

... and the current road map of openCRX

openCRX was released into the public domain on 1-August-2004 and has been under active development ever since. With every new release a whole range of new features and enhancements are added (see also this comprehensive feature list for an overview):

The driving force behind openCRX

Werner Froidevaux and Chris Mueller have been the main drivers behind the development of openCRX; in total there are 4 people working on the project (each spending about 20% of their time on this project). Most of the resources have been donated by CRIXP Corp. and OMEX AG.

Localization is done by a dedicated team of translators who contribute their valuable business and language know how to the project - a list of available locales is available here.

The task of building a CRM suite with such limited resources is doable thanks to MDA (MDA = Model Driven Architecture), which makes our team roughly 10 times more efficient than typical development teams. Our development platform - openMDX - is also playing a major role. We spend virtually no time programming as all the main patterns (persistency, security, etc.) are readily available. Our focus is on analyzing business processes and modeling.